And you thought Dublin’s billboard deal was Dodgy? Check out Dún Laoghaire!
- This topic has 13 replies, 9 voices, and was last updated 16 years, 5 months ago by
.
- Posts
You just couldn’t make this stuff up – DLRCC claims no p.p. is needed and isn’t revealing locations….
From The Irish Times:
No permission required for council’s billboards
Thursday, February 5, 2009
IN THESE tough times, the pressure is on local authorities to come up with new revenue streams. Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council must surely win the prize for most innovative plan to boost the coffers.
It plans to rake in €10m over 10 years by erecting 60 freestanding advertising billboards throughout its area, if its proposal is approved by councillors. One wonders what residents are going to make of the prospect of these tall freestanding advertising structures popping up on their doorsteps. The council won’t reveal exact locations, saying a report outlining the proposed sites will be presented at a council meeting next Monday, some of the pinpointed sites are in conservation areas, like Dalkey and Monkstown.
A spokesperson for the council says that no planning permission will be required if the plan goes ahead. “The proposal will be considered by the public representatives on behalf of local residents.†Indeed. In 2007 the council sought expressions of interest from media firms for the right to erect advertising structures and sell space on them. It is believed that Clear Channel Ireland was chosen and the projected revenue over the course of the contract was over €10m.
The council says the proceeds will be used to “consolidate and increase the expenditure in recreation and amenity of the council budget†and already €700,000 of 2009 expenditure has been incurred on the basis of this revenue stream.
This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times(Already being discussed in the other thread, hutton.)
dreadful
@jdivision wrote:
Another lift by IT
http://www.tribune.ie/news/home-news/article/2009/feb/01/a-10m-deal-to-erect-60-billboards-only-in-dun-laog/Ah now come on jdivision, the IT have a great fresh new angle on this re preventing the public from democratic comment. Btw I think if you check you’ll find the ST first had the story re DLRCC looking at doing this type of deal…
@ctesiphon wrote:
(Already being discussed in the other thread, hutton.)
Fair enough cte, I was aware of that but I figure that people mightn’t be aware that there’s another such dodgy deal in a different LA area to that of DCC – hence I figure it merits a fresh thread of it’s own 😉
The two locations you mention are ‘virtual carpark
‘ for maybe an hour a day in each direction. For the other 23 hours, they move freely enough that large, internally-illuminated, double-sided scrolling screens would likely be a significant distraction from the primary task of drivers, i.e. driving.If you’d read the Inspector’s Reports from the ABP Oral Hearing into the JCDecaux/DCC deal, you’d see clearly that road safety considerations were the primary reason for refusal in every single case.
Also, you might want to update your records- it’s not a ‘Borough’ any more, and they’re not called ‘listed buildings’. Too long in exile, PV?
Most certainly not I timed my exit to perfection getting overseas experience 18 months before everything went belly up; just enough time to move a couple of times and find a recession freindly position; I’ve never been busier in my life!
Maybe things have deteriorated signifcantly since Lehman Bros but the locations mentioned for the decade pre Lehman fulding were clearly gridlocked from 7am to 930 am morning and 430 to 7pm evening PM.
Why ABP got banning 6 sheets wrong is that they are not much different in scale to a bus shelter end and as such are proven not to be a risk to driver safety as the population has over the years learned to factor them into their calculations in chariot navigation. I’d almost say from anecdotal observations that Bus stop poles are involved in more car related accidentsdue to their lack of visibility with drunks.
€16,667 a year is a market rent or something in the direction of a market rent if it is accurate given the current fragility in consumer spending. DLCOCO are doing the right thing on this as their rates base will hammered in the coming 4-6 quarters; if these funds are ring-fenced for culture and the locations are carefully chosen not to damage heritage value then this would be a good result all round.
if these funds are ring-fenced for culture and the locations are carefully chosen not to damage heritage value then this would be a good result all round.
Fixed that for you….
Without a public planning process for these, there will be no debate as the locations, and as we have seen in central dublin, locations will be based on footfall, not on cultural or heritage grounds.
…and as such are proven not to be a risk to driver safety
Really?
http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/2229
“There is growing concern that roadside advertising presents a real risk to driving safety, with conservative estimates putting external distractors responsible for up to 10% of all accidents. In this report, we present a simulator study quantifying the effects of billboards on driver attention, mental workload and performance in Urban, Motorway and Rural environments.
The results demonstrate that roadside advertising has a clear detrimental effect on lateral control, increases mental workload and eye fixations, and on some roads can draw attention away from more relevant road signage. Detailed analysis of the data suggests that the effects of billboards may in fact be more consequential in scenarios which are monotonous or of lower workload. Nevertheless, the overriding conclusion is that prudence should be exercised when authorising or placing roadside advertising. The findings are discussed with respect to governmental policy and guidelines.”
DRIVEN TO DISTRACTION: DETERMINING THE EFFECTS OF ROADSIDE ADVERTISING ON DRIVER ATTENTION
Final report of a study funded by The Rees Jeffreys Road Fund
Dr. Mark S. Young
Janina M. Mahfoud
Ergonomics Research Group
School of Engineering and Design
Brunel Universityhttp://bura.brunel.ac.uk/bitstream/2438/2229/1/Roadside+distractions+final+report+%28Brunel%29.pdf
Without a public planning process for these, there will be no debate as the locations, and as we have seen in central dublin, locations will be based on footfall, not on cultural or heritage grounds.
The scheme in Dublin is one of the most ham-fisted executions of a potentially beneficial scheme I have ever seen. I’m sure the guys at JCD had a real laugh about the sheer lack of research done by DCC and the way politicians were falling over themselves to be the greenest councillors bought the concept that they were delivering a green project when in fact by not looking at the numbers they got a few bikes in return for a contract that had a potential value of millions annually.
Advertisers will of course ask for the locations with the highest footfall and passing traffic levels as they are a business that needs to resell a product to their customer base; all of the advertisers will be represented by local agencies such Ogilvy or McConnells who know their market intimately and will not pay for space that wouldn’t deliver a perceived uplift in product sales.
The job of the Council is to find a list of 60 locations that do not fall foul of the heritage lobby but deliver the footfall and or passing traffic levels required by the advertisers. I have no doubt that in the Borough there are 60 such locations if the Council sit down with the stakeholders in advance to examine on a location by location basis from a list of say 200 potential sites. The real problem with the DCC deal was that a very bad deal was presented after the fact and as a decision that could not be tweaked. This is not the case this time as the deal is still at discussion stage.
DRIVEN TO DISTRACTION: DETERMINING THE EFFECTS OF ROADSIDE ADVERTISING ON DRIVER ATTENTION
Final report of a study funded by The Rees Jeffreys Road Fund
Dr. Mark S. Young
Janina M. Mahfoud
Ergonomics Research Group
School of Engineering and Design
Brunel UniversityWe are all familiar with the contents of that report which was like some other similar reports designed to highlight the problem of 13m HGV trailers being converted to use as quasi billboards for use in fields located beside the inter-urban motorway network. That was a real issue and there were some horrific crashes as a result of 13m*4m billboards appearing least where you expected to see them.
Comparisons with full size billboards are it is felt entirely inappropriate as the deal if it is similar to the DCC debacle would involve posters that are the size of bus shelter ends of which there are clearly far more than 60 in the Borough already and for which there is no proof that people while actually driving have any more chance of crashing into or having accidents gernerally.
DLRCOCO should open site selection up to the stakeholders on this as €1m in the current climate is too much to turn down in principle; it may well be that the only locations that CC will consider are inappropriate but it would be a missed opportunity not to get the stakeholders around the table to examine if summs can be found to ensure that the culture budged isn’t completly savaged by macro economic forces.
@hutton wrote:
Ah now come on jdivision, the IT have a great fresh new angle on this re preventing the public from democratic comment.
Fair point actually
N-road adverts ‘a safety hazard’
The NRA is to challenge Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown council’s plan to erect up to 60 roadside adverts on safety grounds
Ruadhán MacEoinThe National Roads Authority (NRA) has warned a local authority that it will oppose its plans to erect up to 60 kerbside billboards, claiming that they would endanger drivers.
Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown county council has awarded Clear Channel Ireland a 10-year contract to build the scrolling 2.7-sq-metre adverts in an attempt to raise €10m. The roads authority fears they will be placed on national routes.and is also concerned other cash-strapped councils could follow Dun Laoghaire’s lead.
Sean O’Neill of the NRA said the adverts “would be a traffic hazard and would endanger public safety by distracting drivers”. There are four national routes in the area — the N11, N31, M11 and M50 — all with high traffic volumes.
The council, which has already spent ¤700,000 this year in expectation of the revenue the adverts would generate, insists no planning permission is required. But O’Neill said the NRA was examining its options to ensure national routes are not used. “The authority is going to exercise its right to protect the national-route infrastructure and its safety requirements,” he said.
At its monthly meeting last week, the council gave Clear Channel the go-ahead for the billboards, which will be free-standing and illuminated. It used a planning provision known as part 8, normally used to facilitate public works such as sewage pipes.
Richard Shakespeare, the director of the environment and culture department, told councillors, “there many in residential estates, but we’ll look again”.
A council spokeswoman said this weekend: “We have not brought forward any proposal to erect advertising signage on any of the four national roads.”
Ciaran Cuffe, the Green Party TD for Dun Laoghaire, called the proposals a “crazy scheme” and “visual pollution which does not respect the heritage of the area”.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article5734031.ece
Has the ceiling caved in on local democracy?
At a time when the ceiling of the Dun Laoghaire Rathdown Council Chamber caves in councillors vote to install 60 Advertising structures without public consultation.
Council forced to apply for planning on advertising signs
http://www.dublinpeople.com/content/view/1809/57/“The council had originally said it would not have to apply for planning permission for each individual advertising structure as developments under a threshold of e126,000 are deemed to be exempt from requiring planning permission”
This kind of bull needs to be nipped in the bud, it is patently not the function of Part 8 to facilitate these type of licencing deals. Reform of the planning laws are desperately needed to ensure full public consultation and access to justice for these projects.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
